[CentOS-devel] CentOS 8/7.7

On 9/17/19 1:52 PM, Joe Doss wrote:
> How can I start helping? I just signed up for a CentOS account and 
> applied to the Cloud SIG. I am involved in the Fedora Cloud SIG and I 
> have interests in helping where I can with CentOS as my company is 
> going to shift to CentOS 8 for our VMs.
You're making the right steps to start off, that's for sure.

>
> Is there a new user doc I can read or a place to start? 
There are some pages in the wiki about building from source out of git, 
mainly https://wiki.centos.org/Sources but I'm not sure if you would 
consider them 'new user' docs or not; depends on what you mean by 'new 
user' I guess.

> I was hoping I could grab the current CentOS 8 qcow build off of 
> CentOS koji but it seems to be forbidden for some reason.
It's giving you a 'forbidden' because it's not released.  As a previous 
thread started out asking about 'what is Release Work' (which hasn't 
been answered), there is a lot of logistics involved in releasing 
something as large and as 'in-demand' as CentOS 8. Mirrors have to be 
populated, infrastructure has to be prepared, etc, for a release like 
this; mirrors have been syncing for a while, I would guess, as moving 
multiple gigabytes of data out to hundreds of servers is not an 
instantaneous thing.  The last thing you want is a partial mirror being 
used before it's ready, thus the 'forbidden' results from the mirrors 
and from the main CentOS koji; bandwidth, even if you have 10gb/s worth, 
is scarce when you consider the thousands of people who are 'on pins and 
needles' to get their grubby little paws on fresh CentOS 8 ISOs and 
packages.......

So, the most important thing is to be patient; I'm probably going to 
wait until at least the 27th to even start downloading; I've waited this 
long, three more days isn't going to kill me.

Now, back to the idea of help.  I have a bit of experience doing 
rebuilds, as I rebuilt CentOS 5.x for IA64 after CERN dropped SLC5 
support on IA64, for our Altix 350 system (since retired).  This was 
2012 timeframes, by the way.  Everyone here remembers the triple-threat 
release a few years back, when CentOS 6 was near release, CentOS 5.6 was 
near release, and CentOS 4.10 (I think it was 4.10, at least) was near 
release; that's the 'Old Days' of the OP on this thread, incidentally.  
I remember all those offers for help rebuilding packages, especially 5.6 
packages.  Well, as I was stepping up releases from the last SLC IA64 
release (5.4), I found out the hard way what caused the 5.6 delay (if 
you want details, I can go back to my notes).  See, to get a truly 
binary-compatible-to-RedHat distribution, packages sometimes have to be 
built in very specific orders, thus causing the actual package build 
process to be single-threaded, in a manner of speaking, at least back in 
5.x days.

But there's a deeper thing here; there's a trust issue for all the 
people who use CentOS in a production setting; this is why packages are 
signed, and it's why there's a process for signing packages. CentOS is a 
trusted source, and getting the builds and signing too distributed can 
dilute the basis for that trust.  It's kindof like before my middle 
daughter got engaged (and then married less than a month later); I told 
her that I had to know the boy before I could give the boy my blessing 
(so they forged ahead without my blessing.... one of those things).  Not 
that I have reason to distrust you or anyone else; it's just that I 
don't have a proven reason to trust you, because I don't know you.  I've 
run CentOS long enough to trust the current CentOS team, as well as some 
former members of that team (Hi, Russ!) rather deeply, because I've 
known them a long time (even though I've never met most of them in person).